The Growth of Opposition to Nkrumah

Nkrumah's complete domination of political power had served to
isolate lesser leaders, leaving each a real or imagined challenger to
the ruler. After opposition parties were crushed, opponents came only
from within the CPP hierarchy. Among its members was Tawia Adamafio, an
Accra politician. Nkrumah had made him general secretary of the CPP for
a brief time. Later, Adamafio was appointed minister of state for
presidential affairs, the most important post in the president's staff
at Flagstaff House, which gradually became the center for all decision
making and much of the real administrative machinery for both the CPP
and the government. The other leader with an apparently autonomous base
was John Tettegah, leader of the Trade Union Congress. Neither, however,
proved to have any power other than that granted to them by the
president.

By 1961, however, the young and more radical members of the CPP
leadership, led by Adamafio, had gained ascendancy over the original CPP
leaders like Gbedemah. After a bomb attempt on Nkrumah's life in August
1962, Adamafio, Ako Adjei (then minister of foreign affairs), and Cofie
Crabbe (all members of the CPP) were jailed under the Preventive
Detention Act. The CPP newspapers charged them with complicity in the
assassination attempt, offering as evidence only the fact that they had
all chosen to ride in cars far behind the president's when the bomb was
thrown.

For more than a year, the trial of the alleged plotters of the 1962
assassination attempt occupied center stage. The accused were brought to
trial before the three-judge court for state security, headed by the
chief justice, Sir Arku Korsah. When the court acquitted the accused,
Nkrumah used his constitutional prerogative to dismiss Korsah. Nkrumah
then obtained a vote from the parliament that allowed retrial of
Adamafio and his associates. A new court, with a jury chosen by Nkrumah,
found all the accused guilty and sentenced them to death. These
sentences, however, were commuted to twenty years' imprisonment.

In early 1964, in order to prevent future challenges from the
judiciary, Nkrumah obtained a constitutional amendment allowing him to
dismiss any judge. At the same time, Ghana officially became a
single-party state, and an act of parliament ensured that there would be
only one candidate for president. Other parties having already been
outlawed, no non-CPP candidates came forward to challenge the party
slate in the general elections announced for June 1965. Nkrumah had been
re-elected president of the country for less than a year when members of
the National Liberation Council (NLC) overthrew the CPP government in a
military coup on February 24, 1966. At the time, Nkrumah was in China.
He took up asylum in Guinea, where he remained until he died in 1972.